18: JEWISH STORIES TRANSLATED FROM 18 LANGUAGES


By Olga Zilberbourg 

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The Montréal Review, October 2024



The book welcomes the reader with a cover image depicting an abstract industrial mosaic, an elegant graphic in which some might see a landscape. It reminds me of subway design. A few colorful tiles are missing, naked cement peering from below. What platform are we on? New York? London? Toronto? What is the destination of the journey?

The diversity of settings is baked into the structure of this collection, 18 Stories: Jewish Stories Translated from 18 Languages. The editor, Nora Gold, herself based in Toronto, has put together stories that first appeared in the journal she edits, Jewish Fiction (formerly called Jewish Fiction.net), composed in English as well as newly translated from other languages. We begin in Brooklyn with an excerpt from Elie Wiesel’s 2010 novel Hostage set in the era of Gerald Ford’s presidency, translated from French by Catherine Temerson, only to find ourselves on the next page, reading Andrea G. Labinger’s translation of the Varda Fiszbein story “The Guest.”

The story of a grandfather is presiding over the Pesach table in Buenos Aires in 1940, during which a brave guest oversteps family rules over redeeming afikoman to propose to the daughter of the family, is followed by an excerpt from S. Y. Agnon’s novella “And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight” translated from Hebrew by Michael P. Kramer that takes us to the town of Buczacz during the reign of the Emperor Franz Joseph. From here, we move on to Hungary in 1969 in “The First Christmas,” a story by Gábor T. Szántó, translated by Walter Burgess and Marietta Morry, before a story “Purimspiel” by Jasminka Domaš translated from Croatian by Iskra Pavlović asks us to picture a woman in Zagreb, preparing for a Purim party, magically transported to Kochi, India, “speaking a strange language and trying to explain something.” 

Despite this kaleidoscope of historical eras, languages, and places, the book has a very coherent feel, determined I believe by its approach to what is “Jewish” in “Jewish fiction.” In defining “Jewish fiction," Gold relies on a phrase introduced by Cynthia Ozick that Ruth Wisse expanded into a paradigm of “centrally Jewish” fiction: “reflective in some way of Jewish experience, Jewish consciousness, or the Jewish condition.” Many characters in this book celebrate Jewish holidays and study the Torah, while others revisit the trauma of the Holocaust and pogroms. Gold’s definition of Jewish fiction is distinct from other potential takes on the material. For example, scholar Dan Miron in his book From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking, encourages us to think of Jewish writing as “open-ended,” “totally alien, in language, form, and content, to anything beforehand identified as ‘Jewish.’” Gold’s project is not that, and I appreciate that she sets my expectations straight in her introduction, inviting me to read 18 Stories through the lens of a deeply shared Jewish peoplehood across the diaspora.

As a product of Soviet Jewish culture living in the US, I find no story here that mirrors my own relationship with Jewishness, trying to navigate the contemporary world of complex—and, at times, bitterly incompatible—identities. Only one story, coming from the former Soviet bloc, explicitly focuses on the post-Holocaust drama of assimilation. This is Szántó’s “The First Christmas” set in Budapest that pits the Holocaust survivor father against his sons who protest being the only kids in their class not to have a Christmas tree in their home.

Another piece, an excerpt from a novel by Birte Kont, “A Place Nowhere,” translated from Danish by Nina Sokol, is about a young teen’s experience learning of her parents’ Holocaust survival story first from a teacher and then from a woman who, I surmised, had been a servant in the parents’ house and knows the details of their escape route. Though this isn’t, on its surface, a story that deals with assimilation, it does show the extent to which some survivors tried to protect their children from the knowledge of the past that they considered shameful. The young narrator is aware of being Jewish, but at the opening of the piece, she is ignorant of the trauma in her own origin story. As her teacher says, “To be historyless! That is like a vessel without a compass.” This, to me, is one way of looking at forced assimilation.

The underrepresentation of narratives in which one’s Jewish identity is in question certainly isn’t a criticism of this collection as much as an observation of the editorial vision behind it: in selecting from a rich trove of source material, Gold chose a certain kind of diversity over another. To quote from another story from this book, Norman Manea’s “Place of Birth: Report on the State of the Union,” translated from Romanian by Jean Harris, “Not for unanimity, it might be said, was the chosen people chosen!” I’m here—as I had been in my childhood, studying Leon Feuchtwanger and Isaac Babel for clues—to learn about how others have carried the Jewish tradition. And where they have carried it to.

The sense of geographical displacement is the stand-out achievement of this collection. Whatever one’s preconceptions about the traditional centers of the Jewish world—Jerusalem? Odessa? Brooklyn? Buenos Aires?—this book places these cities in a long list of locales, separated by a comma. Gold’s methodical approach in soliciting work is apparent both from the breadth of sources and from the caliber of work. Included are stories by two Nobel prize winners, as well as work by prize-winning translators. The prose collected here is eminently worth spending time with.

Many of the pieces are excerpts from novels, a few of which have been published but many of which have appeared only in their original languages and are still looking for their English-language publishers. I’m particularly rooting for the publication, in full, of Where Were You When Darkness Fell by Mario Levi, hailing from Turkey, the excerpt translated here by Leyla Tonguç Basmacı. I was moved by the generational conflict between Isaac and his father, a perfume shop owner in Istanbul. Wishing to escape the life of a small-time businessman, Isaac enrolls in the London School of Economics and makes a living working in restaurants run by Cypriot Turks, but eventually finds England too hostile and returns to Istanbul to take over his father’s business. “I simply came back, or maybe I ran away once again. It was as if in London I had left behind a dream based only on lies.” The mix of biographical and philosophical narration in this story felt distinctive, a style unique to this author.

Valente’s Sonata in Auschwitz is another novel that I would love to see in English in Bethencourt’s translation I found fast-paced and compelling. The narration in the excerpt switches between first and third person and centers Amalia, a young woman of German origin, raised in Lisbon. One day in 1999, Amalia overhears her father’s phone conversation with his mother, from whom he has been estranged, and learns about the existence of her great-grandmother Frida, who is about to turn one hundred years old and still lives in Berlin. Amalia decides to meet her great-grandmother, and during this meeting comes to realize that Frida doesn’t see anything wrong with the fact that her husband “just followed orders” of the Nazi regime. The excerpt stops there, just hinting at a Holocaust story to unfold, leaving my curiosity piqued.

The author I was drawn to the most in this collection isn’t Babel—whose Red Cavalry stories of Jewish pogroms in the Soviet Civil War were formative to me growing up—but a writer entirely new to me, Lily Berger. Narrated from the point of view of the sole female student of a shtetl’s kheyder, it tells of the teacher’s wife Khaye, bigger than him in every sense of the word: “a Jewish Cossack who tolerated no injustice.” Khaye follows her own sense of right and wrong, and redistributes the kids’ lunches between them, making sure that the poorest student always has something to eat.

Jaeger’s translation is musical and allows Khaye’s voice to resound in all of its big-hearted passion. “Is it fair that your Yoyne should eat so much that it actually gives him a stuffed head? And a poor orphan should waste away? . . . It is not according to law and not according to justice that one should eat to the bursting point and another should starve,” Khaye declares with “conviction and resolve.” I couldn’t hold back tears at the end of this story.

Perhaps one limitation that comes from following a narrower definition of Jewish fiction is that the stories skew toward the old tropes of Jewish culture: fear and persecution. The collection is bookended by the excerpt from Wiesel’s novel Hostage, which imagines a Jewish storyteller in 1970s Brooklyn kidnapped by the fighters for the Palestinian cause, portrayed without much subtlety as the bloodthirsty villains, and by the stories from Babel’s Red Cavalry, here in the fresh, moving translation by Boris Dralyuk, that has us reliving the devastating and senseless acts of torture and murder in the pogroms.

While undoubtedly fear and persecution have been a part of Jewish lives for centuries, and very much remain with us today, other stories—most notably, penned by women in this book—highlight resilience and strength of their characters, their hunger for knowledge, justice, and connection with others. Stepping away from this collection, I find myself deeply moved, edified by having learned of new writers to follow, and convinced by Gold that I need to pay more attention to Jewish fiction written around the globe.

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Olga Zilberbourg is a San Francisco-based writer, editor, and reviewer. She is the author of the collection of short stories and flash fiction Like Water & Other Stories (WTAW Press, 2019). She contributes essays and book reviews to Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and is a regular writer for On the Seawall and The Common.

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